The Practical Joke War of the Summer of 1995
by Threepwillow
Summary: Fred and George's demands for proof that Sirius and Remus are Padfoot and Moony lead to a full-scale war inside Number 12, Grimmauld Place. :::Remus/Sirius, Fred/George but it's not, really, it's weird::: NOW COMPLETE!
1. Chapter 1

**The Number 12, Grimmauld Place Practical Joke War of the Summer of 1995**

Sirius Black had exactly one day to himself in his old house at Number 12 Grimmauld Place before members of Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix began to move in.

Something seemed strange about the whole place almost right when he opened the door. He supposed that was to be expected, considering how strange it all was in its own right. Sirius could barely take two steps across the floor of the foyer for the clutter - papers and dishes and molded old curtains, books strewn from shelves and framed pictures dashed from the walls. The chandelier in the foyer had crumpled to the ground, and the wallpaper was peeling (though he'd never really cared for it, so he didn't mind too terribly). Everything smelled of things growing and rotting in it that shouldn't have been, which was especially remarkable given that nothing appeared to have seen sunlight for years.

_If I had ever had a chance to be an Auror,_ Sirius thought to himself, _I wouldn't ever have been the sort to ransack a man's entire house looking for him._ Especially since they should have known he wouldn't be there, the great imbeciles.

Covering his nose to the musty stench, Sirius nudged his feet through the ankle-high mess to clear paths down the long hallway from the door to the staircase leading up, to the staircase leading down, to the dining room. The big glass cabinet that had once housed the family china looked oddly empty, and the lefthand pane of the door was cracked in several places, but Sirius decided he rather liked it that way. And at any rate, it would be worthless to try to start cleaning now. There was no way any headway would be made before the rest of the Order arrived; best to just wait until he could get some help (and by help, Sirius thought wryly, he meant Molly Weasley). He did halfheartedly right the troll-foot umbrella stand at the foot of the stairs.

That was when Sirius placed it, the thing that had been off. It wasn't the wallpaper, or the smell, or the inability to take two steps across the faded, worn-thin carpet without sloughing through mess like fallen leaves.

It was the silence.

"...Mother?" Sirius said softly - not too loud, just in case she actually was still here, for he didn't want to set her off. Slowly, Sirius crept toward the place along the wall where his mother's gigantic, ominous portrait was hanging. In front of it, someone had hung up a thick, sage-green set of curtains, moth-eaten and out of place (Sirius thought they might have come from Regulus's room originally). Even tattered as they were, they blocked the portrait from the rest of the house and kept Walburga Black silent - something Sirius, from the moment he'd been Sorted into Gryffindor House, had never quite managed to do on his own (be it portrait or the woman herself). And as he continued on up the stairs, he found that it was a bit easier to walk without tripping on things - that perhaps a path had been cleared here once before, by someone walking, just as Sirius was, toward his bedroom.

He opened the door to find it much the same as the rest of the house: half completely unchanged from when Sirius had last lived in it almost eighteen years ago, half ransacked by those who'd gone looking for him to toss him into Azkaban. There was a big stack of ripped-up motorcycle magazines piled in one corner; a sort of smear of maroon in another that had once been his proud, defiant Gryffindor paraphernalia; and in his bed, with a small bottle of aged firewhisky and two glasses set on the table beside, a book open across his lap that he seemed to be reading distractedly, and _no shirt_, was the lanky, fair-haired form of one Remus John Lupin, who was definitely not where Sirius had left him.

Remus looked up as Sirius entered, slipping the book aside as if he were quite glad to be done with it. "Hullo," he breathed, his soft smile reaching up to his eyes in a way Sirius hadn't seen it do in a long, long time.

Sirius Black had exactly one day in his old house at Number 12 Grimmauld Place before members of Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix began to move in, but he most certainly did _not_ have that day to himself.

-xxx-

George Weasley scowled down at the paper in front of him, held in his right hand and Fred's left. The one, short sentence was written in a hand that even they recognized as Dumbledore's by now.

_The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London._

"Got it memorized?" asked their father.

"Right," said Fred.

The strange house blossomed up like a particularly nasty weed between its two neighbors, and they all stumbled inside - first their mother, tugging Ginny inside just as quickly, then Ron holding tight to Hermione, George, Fred, and their father at the rear, shooing them all in, quicker, quieter. As they crossed the threshold George felt the slip of parchment in his hand disintegrate with a soft fizzle of painless fire, and soon he felt nothing but Fred's fingers against his own. That distraction gone, he raised his head to blink around at the house's insides as they crossed down the hallway.

"Bit like our house, isn't it," their father said, trying to be comforting, "lots of rooms to stay in, plenty of space - "

"Never in the _history_ of _my_ house has there been such a _mess_!" their mother cried. "Sirius Black, are you even here? What on _earth_ - "

"No no no!" hissed a voice, accompanied by the soft thud of someone taking the stairs as quickly as possible. "Molly - "

"Remus!" she said, harshness leaving her voice (but only slightly). "Surely _you_ wouldn't let him - "

"Not so _loud_, Molly, or - "

It was too late, George realized. When his mother was cross, _not so loud_ was rather an impossibility. And apparently Grimmauld Place only had room for one loud, cross mother.

"_What mess of Muggle-loving, bottom-feeding traitors have dared set foot inside my house?_" screamed the portrait, curtains jolting sharply to one side of the rod supporting them. Ron, who'd been standing closest to the portrait, leapt about a foot in the air. "_Scum and droppings, every last freckly one of you! Leave this place, you have no right, tarnishing my home with your stench and slime!_"

"Oh, stuff it," said Hermione sharply. "My Muggleborn feet are going to go wherever they please, thank you very much."

"_MUGGLEBORN?_" the portrait shrieked. "_A MUDBLOOD HAS TREAD WHERE NOBILITY ONCE TROD? HOW DARE - _"

Remus had reached the ground floor now, with Sirius - looking as though he'd perhaps only awakened to the sound of his mother's voice - not too far behind. Together they grabbed onto the curtain and attempted to wrench it back into place, but they didn't seem to be having much luck on their own, and Mr. Weasley eventually leaned in to help.

George looked at Fred, raising one eyebrow and smirking slightly to the right. With one nod, Fred agreed, and the two of them Apparated up to the second floor, looking for a spare room where they could un-Shrink their luggage back to regular size and claim as their own.

Let everyone else deal with _that_ nasty problem.

By the time Ron made it up past the portrait and to the landing of the second floor, a bit out of breath, George and Fred had already staked out the largest, nicest-looking spare room (on the third floor, in the back corner, with a wide bed they could share and the least amount of undesirable inhabitants) and were sitting there waiting for him.

"Thanks for all your help," Ron muttered with a glare.

"Don't mention it!" said Fred.

"Always happy to be of service," added George.

"Sirius's mum, I take it?"

"Yeah," said Ron. "Lupin at least had the sense to put up that curtain. Says if we keep quiet she usually can't tell we're around."

"None of your usual girlish squeals, then, Ronnykins," George warned him.

"Oi! If anyone's going to be squealing it's Ginny." Ron shot a glance back down the stairs. "Hermione insisted on taking the room on the first landing as close as possible to it out of spite - and you know Mum's put Ginny in there with her, _safety in numbers_ and all that."

"Good thing we come with built-in roommates," George said, throwing an arm over Fred's shoulder.

"I'll say," Fred agreed, with a wink.

They both turned to their younger brother. "_We_ don't snore."

-xxx-

Remus Lupin finished his morning cup of tea, reclining against a small strip of bare wall in the kitchen with a sigh.

The meeting the night before had taken quite a while, and it had been especially hard to orchestrate without arousing the suspicions of number twelve's five youngest occupants. Remus knew the secrecy wouldn't be effective for too much longer; and yet he didn't know which would be worse - pretending like there were no meetings at all, or letting the children find out about the meetings only to turn them away and spike their curiosity even more. There was no avoiding suspicious teenagers either way. But Remus had always been an early riser, and a light sleeper ever since he'd made an enemy out of the moon, so with meetings running so late at night, he could tell he'd be a bit exhausted for the next month or so.

He was going to need to buy some more chocolate.

As he set his faded teacup delicately in the sink, Remus began running a mental list of the rooms that needed cleaning still. Molly had done the dining room already, bless her, so the meeting could have a proper location. And he and Sirius had spent a bit of time making the rooms where they themselves were sleeping a bit more hospitable (Sirius had wanted his own bedroom especially clean for the...activities that had taken place in it). But the kitchen, as he surveyed it, was a mess, and as far as he could tell the house-elf didn't want to listen to anyone except Sirius, and not even him half the time. They were just going to have to do it themselves. And the front drawing room - large, dark, no doubt brimming with unwanted inhabitants - was going to take at least a whole day and probably four or five people. Remus was worried about what might spread from there into the rest of the house if it wasn't handled soon.

"Molly can do this down here too, then," he said to himself, "and we'll take that blasted drawing room."

"Molly can do what now - dear _lord_," the woman said, as she appeared at the bottom of the staircase and took stock of the ruinated kitchen. "What kind of household was being run here, _gracious_!"

"The kind that might be harboring a wanted criminal, and thus had to be heartily ransacked," Remus said glumly. "Apparently."

"Bloody Aurors," Molly muttered. "I wish any of them were capable of doing their job _neatly_ as well as thoroughly! If I'm to make any sort of edible breakfast down here we shall have to clear this out too." She turned back toward the stairs and called up them. "Hermione dear! Would you wake my lazy fool of a daughter and bring her down here? We've got to get started on all of this or it'll be October before we finish!"

Remus smiled. "What would we do without you, Molly?"

"You'd begin growing mold on your very clothing, is what. Now run along, I'll need as much space as I can get amongst all this _rubbish_ if I plan to make any sort of progress."

"Going to have a try at that drawing room myself, I think," Remus told her. "I think there's at least one boggart in there."

"Excellent idea! If you need any extra manpower, just rouse those great lumps I call sons. Honestly, I don't see how any of them are _my_ children, the only one that inherited a scrap of motivation and work ethic was - "

She stopped, biting her lip and scrunching her face up as though she'd nearly brought herself to tears. Remus took this as his cue to leave, and nudged past her and back up the stairs to the main floor. He kept ascending, up and up and up to the very top, where he slipped silently into Sirius's room and eased himself onto the still-occupied bed.

"Sirius," Remus whispered, close enough to his ear that his lips brushed ever-so-slightly against it. "It's time to wake up, Sirius."

"Moooonnyyy," Sirius whined faintly, clutching at his quilt and drawing it halfway up over his face as if to block Remus out. Remus smiled and gently tugged the blanket away. He wasn't going to have any of _that_.

"Come on, lots of work to do," Remus insisted. "And sooner or later Molly will have made us breakfast."

"I've barely slept!" protested Sirius. "That late-night Order meeting, whose idea - "

But Remus, anxious to halt his complaints, leaned around overtop of him and silenced Sirius with a soft and almost effortless kiss. Eyes opening a good bit wider, Sirius returned it, and then slowly stirred and sat up, Remus giving him space to do so with a quiet chuckle.

"Damn you, Moony, exploiting my weaknesses," Sirius scolded. "I suppose you want me to come clean things with you?"

"That's the thought, yeah," Remus said, the laugh still in his voice. "And you are the only one that poor old house-elf listens to."

"_Poor old house-elf,_" Sirius echoed snidely. "Miserable thing."

"Get on some clothes you don't mind dirtying and I'll meet you down in that wretched drawing room." Remus rose from the bed and headed to the door. "I'm going to go see if I can recruit Fred and George."

"Not going to stick around and watch me get undressed?" Sirius said with a leer.

Remus turned over his shoulder and flashed Sirius no insignificant look of his own. "Now Padfoot, surely you realize that that would hardly be conducive to getting anything clean."

Leaving Sirius to ponder that one, Remus headed back down the stairs and stopped on the next landing when he came face-to-face with the exact people he was looking for.

"Ah, you're awake."

"After a fashion," one of them grumbled.

"Rather hard to sleep with everyone shuffling about all of the sudden."

"Or with your sister screaming in your ear."

"Ahh," said Remus, studying on them. He could usually tell them apart, but only after he'd spent a good bit of time around them - it was a matter of distinguishing the one that reminded him more of Sirius (that would be Fred) from the one that reminded him of James (George). But perhaps it was rather too early in the morning.

"Breakfast on yet?"

"Your mother is working on cleaning up the kitchen, I believe," Remus said. "After that's done, at least partially, she'll probably have something for everyone to eat. Meanwhile I was hoping you two would help Sirius and myself clean out the drawing room on the first floor."

"Why start there?"

"Yeah, no one's sleeping in there."

"Room _we're_ in could use a good scrubdown."

"And you'd best hope Ron doesn't find any spiders in his - "

"Or you'll never get the curtains shut over Dame Shriekington down there ever again." The twins grinned at each other.

Remus sighed. He was nervous about the parasites that could be crawling about in the drawing room, but he'd take those over Walburga Black calling him a _filthy inhuman fiend_ any day of the week. "All right then. Breakfast first and your room second?"

"Now you're talking," the two redheads sang at once.

It took Molly Weasley a good hour to clean out a big enough portion of the kitchen to cook feasibly, and by then everyone was wide awake and talking about all sorts of things. Ron and Ginny were excited that their older brother Bill would soon be returning to the country, and were eager to tell Hermione all about him; Sirius and Arthur seemed to be discussing bits of Sirius's old flying motorbike that Remus had never quite understood. The Weasley twins, however, seemed to be keeping to themselves, and every so often one of them - Remus was sure at this point that it was Fred - would shoot him a funny look.

It took until after lunch, with their room and their younger brother's room as clean as they were getting and the girls' room just begun, for Remus to discover why. Slowly, one twin slipped over to stand next to Remus (at some point he'd lost track) as he Scoured mold from the inside of the wardrobe, and leaned in low so no one else could hear.

"Is it true, then, that you and Sirius are Moony and Padfoot?"

It was the last thing Remus had been expecting, but once the shock wore off it made him smile more than anything. "That's right," he answered. "Harry's shown you the Map, I take it?"

The twin scoffed. "Ha! We had that thing way before it fell into Harry's hands. It's bloody brilliant. George and I reckon it'd take us months to reproduce."

Remus raised an eyebrow at him. "Is that so?"

"No need, though, we've committed all the good bits to memory. Never would have turned it over to Harry otherwise." He paused, and turned his own wand on the mold as well. "But that's the thing. It almost seems far _too_ brilliant."

"Go on?"

"Well, Sirius as Padfoot we could sort'f see," Fred continued. "He did manage to escape from Azkaban after all. But _you_ as a Marauder? Doesn't quite seem to fit now, does it?"

The mold gone, Remus rounded on Fred. "What exactly are you getting at?"

"We want you to prove it." They spoke in unison again, George having appeared leaning on his twin's shoulder with one hand and hovering a thick lump of cleared-out spider web an inch or so from the tip of his wand with the other.

"Prove to us that you're Marauders, both of you."

"Since if you're not one, he's probably not one either."

"You two going kind of hand in hand and all."

"And how do you suggest I go about doing that?"

George rolled his eyes, and when they landed back on Remus there was an ominous gleam in them.

"If you really _are_ the Marauders - "

" _- you'll think of something!_"

-xxx-

As it turned out at the end of the day, with the kitchen finally spotless from top to bottom, there were _just_ enough plates left that were neither broken nor completely, disgustingly unusable for everyone in the house to have exactly one to eat from.

Fred looked around the dinner table at the people that constituted "everyone:" his entire family, minus his three older brothers, with his mum fussing over absolutely everything at one end of their ginger swathe and Ron shoveling in mouthful after mouthful at the other; Hermione, sitting next to Ron and trying absently to ladle food onto her plate with one hand and read a book with the other; Mundungus Fletcher, whom Fred hadn't quite decided yet if he liked or not; Sirius and Lupin, sitting together discussing something in hushed tones right across from Fred and George; Kingsley Shacklebolt, a tall imposing Ministry employee whom Fred _had_ decided that he liked; and Dumbledore, who'd just stopped in briefly to discuss something with Fred's father and was going to be leaving almost immediately after dinner.

Fred had been waiting for a good ten minutes for his sister to pass him the gravy, and once she finally got the hint he poured it liberally onto his chicken and potatoes and began to dig in. As hungry as he had become, he was very surprised when the fork that entered his mouth had absolutely no food on it.

He frowned down at his plate. Had it just slipped back off? Fred tried again, this time with his vegetables. They, too, did not make it into his mouth, and indeed did not seem to have left his plate at all. He made a third attempt, and this time he was certain he'd skewered his chicken quite thoroughly. Something was amiss.

"Curious..." he muttered, but no one seemed to notice except for George - who, as it turned out, was having similar problems.

"Something off with your food, too?" he said. George took a big bite of potatoes, but the instant the fork reached his mouth Fred could see that they were back on his plate, in a lump that looked completely untouched.

"Something's fishy," said Fred. "I'm going to get a new fork, you want one?"

"I'll come with you." With the usual loud cracking sound - a sound that was still music to Fred's ears - they both vanished from the dinner table, Apparating down into the kitchen and landing practically on top of Kreacher.

"Blood traitors stomping on Kreacher!" the house-elf hissed, but it wasn't very menacing.

"We'll be out of here before you know it," said Fred.

"Go back to your hidey-hole," said George.

They rooted around in the drawers of an old chest carved through with serpents until they found the measly stack of spare forks. There were only three, and none of them proper dinner forks, but it would have to do. Hanging onto their new silverware, they Disapparated, and arrived in their seats at the dinner table once more.

"_Did I excuse you two?_" squawked their mother.

"We're inexcusable," they chimed in unison, mostly ignoring her. Fred, for one, was more focused on finally eating some dinner. Evicting the colony of rats from the baseboard of Hermione and Ginny's room had fallen solely on George and himself - Ron, Lupin and Sirius still weren't too fond of dealing with any kind of rat, understandably - and it had been a bit exhausting.

Unfortunately, his problem had not yet been solved. "_Damn,_" Fred hissed as his empty fork met his lips once more.

"S'not the forks," George said.

"Well it can't be the food," said Fred. "Everyone else is tucking in quite heartily, isn't that _right_, Ronnie."

"Whuoh?" Ron said thickly, mouth full to bursting with half-chewed chicken.

"Well if it's not the forks and it's not the food - "

"Must be the plates!" Fred groaned.

"But we can't get new plates, there aren't any!" George said. "We'd have to un-jinx these."

"They've already got food all on them, though," said Fred. "I don't like un-jinxing things with food in the way - you remember what happened with that batch of you-know-whats we were making."

"Have to scrape it off onto _something_, then," said George. "I'm not wasting this much food, there won't be a lot left with this many people."

"Something wrong?" Lupin said lightly, emerging from his conversation with Sirius. Someone else had finally noticed their predicament.

"Yeah, something's wrong, I can't eat my bloody - oh, _no_," Fred hissed. No, it couldn't have been. But Lupin's face was suspiciously impassive, and Sirius was having a hard time making eye contact with either of them. Fred nudged George in the arm with his elbow and in seconds they had Apparated back into the kitchen and found bowls into which to scrape their food instead of plates, as they tried to remove whatever hex was keeping them from eating.

In the smears of gravy left on their jinxed, cracking plates, Fred could make out the forms of words.

_Suppose this is proof enough?_ said his own. _Love, Mr. Moony and Mr. Padfoot_, said George's.

"_Love_," George spat. "Very funny."

"Not bad, though," said Fred. "You have to admit.

"We might should try this on Ron sometime," agreed George, "it'll no doubt infuriate a porker like him."

"Still..." Fred said.

"You don't come between a man and his food."

"Then we are in agreement."

"Absolutely."

"_This means war._"

And so the war began.


	2. Chapter 2

**Part the Second, In Which the Thot Plickens**

It was the following night - after the third one of those Order of the Phoenix meetings that _certainly hadn't started yet, not that we'd tell you if they had!_ - that they finally stopped Apparating everywhere, and actually _snuck_ out of bed. As boisterous as they were in the daylight, Fred and George Weasley were perfectly capable of being quite stealthy when they chose to. They just rarely ever chose to.

Fred signaled to his brother, pointing up first and down second. The message was clear - upstairs or downstairs? Did they booby-trap Sirius's room first, or Lupin's? George's answer came with a thumb jerked toward the ceiling. Sirius was a sounder sleeper. Easier to do that first and get it out of the way, in case they messed up the first time. (Not that they would, of course.) They crept slowly down the hall with its heavily-worn carpet, tiptoed up the stairs, and came to a stop just outside the door of Sirius's bedroom.

George withdrew the parchment on which they'd written out their plans just as Fred was mouthing "_Lumos_," and lighting his wand to illuminate it. Slowly but surely, they laid in the necessary incantations: the original charm, plus several to ensure it couldn't be easily broken, another to guarantee that it was virtually undetectable, and preventing it from affecting anyone but their intended target (in case, for horrid example, their mother came knocking on Sirius's door the next morning to wake him up). Only when they got to the last one - the sort of signature they were going to leave - did Fred raise an eyebrow at George, wondering exactly what to...call themselves. They just had to be snide about it, didn't they?

"We don't exactly turn into animals," George whispered as soundlessly as possible.

"Got to use some other defining characteristic. Ginger, you reckon?"

"Doesn't really _define_ us with over half the family in the house as well," George reminded him, tugging on a bit of Fred's hair. "Only thing we've truly got going for us is..."

"_This_," they realized in unison.

They laid in the last charm together, with a flicker of neon-pink specks trailing through the air, and then darted down to the room next door to Ron's to repeat the same in violent purple.

-xxx-

Sirius Black was quite pleased to discover that when he woke up in the morning, Remus was still curled tightly against him. He was obviously awake, of course, drawing nothing-patterns against the curve of Sirius's arm; Remus was always awake first. But he'd usually left to go back to his own room before the crack of dawn, always worried about _suspicions_, always worried about _people will talk_. Sirius, quite frankly, was ready to let them talk. He and Remus had spent thirteen years or more apart from one another, mistrusting, uncertain. Nowadays Sirius was always _certain_, damnit.

"You're here," was all he said, the faintest whisper into the dimness of his bedroom.

"You're awake," came Remus's surprised response.

"Well yeah...hang on a moment," said Sirius. "What time is it?"

"Not quite half past six," Remus informed him.

"_What_?"

"I was amazed myself," said Remus, pausing with a bit of a sad smile. "You're usually never awake when I'm doing this."

Both men lay with eyes fixated on the spot where the warm, callused tips of Remus's fingers were coasting over the slightly sallow skin of Sirius's shoulder. The touch didn't tickle enough to make Sirius squirm, though it was close - it just...relaxed him, somehow.

"Usually," he said faintly.

Remus didn't respond.

Sirius suddenly didn't care if they had to keep it secret well into his hundreds, as long as Remus would keep doing soft unprovoked things like _that_.

"I...should go back to my room," said Remus, after a bit.

"No sense leaving me alone, if we're both awake," said Sirius. "Let's go down and make some tea."

They both took the climb out of Sirius's bed at a slow crawl, neither one anxious to leave its warmth and comfort. (Strange, thought Sirius, and beautifully so - he didn't recall it being very warm and comfortable when he'd last slept in it regularly.) They tugged on robes and slacks and began the descent. As Remus passed through the doorway out of Sirius's bedroom, he paused, scrunching his nose a bit.

"Funny," he said, but he couldn't get in another word before Sirius had passed under the doorframe, too - and his robes had gone an absolutely vile shade of pink.

"What in the..." Sirius hissed. He darted back into his room to get a look at himself in the mirror, but the pink vanished. The transformation only remained if he tried to leave his room. "What is this?"

"Particularly nice bit of charms work, I'd say," Remus said casually.

"Easy for you to say, you're not the one who's gone all magenta." Sirius scowled, trying to turn over his shoulder and get a better look at his vivid robes - he could have sworn he'd seen something gold and twinkling in addition to the horrid color. "Go and grab me another one, will you?"

"No," said Remus. "I imagine any robe you try to wear out the door will just transfigure similarly...I'm afraid they'll have made it much like the plates from last night."

"_Who_ will have done, you say?" Sirius said, with a sinking, frustrated feeling that he already knew the answer.

"_'Gemini & Gemini, Esquire,'_" read Remus from the across Sirius's back.

"Those _brats_!" Sirius growled...but his heart wasn't quite in it. He had to admit the magic was impressive - they'd obviously just picked up that Transferrable Charm from Remus and himself the evening before, and were already using it to their advantage. Quick studies, he would have to give them that.

And really, if they were going to insist on starting this little game...well, at least it would give Sirius something to do.

-xxx-

When George arrived at breakfast to see Sirius dressed only from the waist down, he could barely avoid the sniggering that threatened to escape him; but when he saw that Lupin stood beside him neither shirtless nor bright violet, he froze with a frown, causing Fred to collide with his back and stumble a bit.

"What's on?" Fred asked.

"It's what's _not_ on," George said, gesturing.

"No way!" said Fred. "I know he's an ex-professor, and a bit of a sneak, but that was some damn good work."

"There's no way," George agreed.

"Can't you two shove _off_!" complained Ginny, prodding at both of them from behind where they stood on the threshold of the dining room. "Some of us are trying to get pancakes before Ron takes all of them."

"Some of us are watching our girlish figures," Fred shot back, but she just elbowed past them stubbornly to dive at the sparse remaining food.

"Bit of a lost cause with arms like that!" George added. Ginny poured syrup across her plate defiantly. Fred filed in behind her in their mother's crude assembly line and George, like always, was on his heels.

"The only way," he said, "is if Lupin wasn't _in_ his room last night when we hexed it."

"And hasn't been since," said Fred. "Where would he be spending his nights instead?"

"Dunno," said George. "But let's not tell him, we could still hook him tomorrow."

Fred grinned. "Well, naturally. Why would we ever think of _telling_ him?"

George sat elbow to elbow with Sirius at the breakfast table, relishing in the fact that his bites of egg ended up thoroughly inside his mouth. In between a couple of them he flashed grins first to Fred and then to the man beside him.

"Feeling a bit warm this morning, then?"

-xxx-

"I hate boggarts," Sirius whined.

Remus chuckled at him. "That's because yours turns into your cousin."

"Yours would too, if you had cousins like mine."

"Somehow I doubt that," said Remus, but he was still smiling. It was hard not to smile when you'd spent all day with a shirtless Sirius Black. "I'm just amazed yours isn't a dementor, like poor Harry's."

Sirius scowled. "It'll be a cold day in Hell when I'm afraid of those bloody things again. Lose their effect when you're staring at them day in and day out, they do. Bellatrix is much more terrifying."

"If you say so."

They'd cleaned out two more of the upstairs bedrooms, as well as a bathroom. The bathroom, in the rusted-shut medicine cabinet, was where they'd found the boggart. There wasn't much to do with the fake wailing form of Bellatrix Lestrange, so Remus had stepped in and _Riddikulus_-ed his damnable glowing full moon into a popped balloon, which had gone shooting out of the bathroom window as all the air rushed out of it. Then it had been a full afternoon of _Scourgify_. And, on Remus's part, staring at shirtless Sirius Black.

Alone together in Sirius's room at the end of the day, he had since let himself do a little bit more than staring.

"I hate _cleaning_," Sirius huffed, rolling over against Remus to frown at the ceiling.

"Broadening the spectrum of your loathing, are we?"

"Just doesn't really feel like my house," he said. "So it doesn't seem right that I should have to clean it."

"Don't give yourself all the credit," Remus scolded. "Molly's made miles of progress."

"And I miss Harry."

Remus fell silent. He shouldn't have mentioned his name - it always set Sirius off. It was practically every other sentence from Sirius's mouth any more. _What's for breakfast? I miss Harry. Guess we ought to keep scrubbing upstairs. When's Harry getting here?_ Remus hardly thought it fair that Sirius had been able to spend less than twenty-four hours with his godson at once ever since his escape, and Remus, just an old family friend, had been his professor for an entire school year and seen him almost every day.

"You know it's not safe," he said after a bit.

"I hate," said Sirius, "being safe."

Remus could certainly agree with that.

"And that is why, Mister Moony," Sirius said extravagantly, draping his arm over Remus's stomach, "you do not get to go back to your room again tonight."

Remus bit his lip. "Oh, but twice in a row? Sirius, we - "

"Are not children any more, Moony," he said. "If anyone has a problem with us, it is precisely that: _their_ problem. Now _stay_."

"Oi, who's the dog here and who isn't?" Remus teased. "Next you'll be telling me to play dead, or - "

"_Roll over_," Sirius said dangerously; and Remus was about to snap back - though he had every intention of obeying the command - when Sirius suddenly changed his mind and bounded out of the bed, slinking instead toward the window.

"Oh, that's _it_!"

"What's _what_?" Remus demanded, quite befuddled.

"I've been trying to come up with something to get those two ginger gits back all day," said Sirius. "Hold that thought, I'll be right back." He was climbing through the window now - on the fourth floor of his house, mind, and wearing only his trousers - and seemed very intent on whatever he was doing.

"Padfoot, have you gone mad?" Remus hissed, crossing to the window as well.

"They're in the room right under us, Moony," Sirius said. "And I've snuck out from this window a time or two before. Don't worry, I'll be back before you know it."

And he was, of course, grinning like a mad thing and giving Remus absolutely no answers beyond thick kisses and wandering hands, but Remus couldn't help but think that he would really like it if Sirius were safe, after all - no matter how much hatred Sirius himself harbored toward the idea.

-xxx-

Fred was having a pretty strange dream.

He'd run down a long, dark hallway, with bunches of open doors lining either side of it. Somehow, though, he knew that for whatever reason - if he were running _from_ something and seeking shelter, or if he was running _to_ something and trying desperately to reach his goal - that none of these doors and the dimly-lit rooms they opened into were the right one. No, the right answer was definitely to keep running down the hallway, wand at the ready, robe billowing behind him, prepared for whatever he had to be prepared for.

When he'd reached the end of the hallway, Fred had been a bit surprised to find not another door but a wide, thick windowpane of glass, letting him look through onto another hallway just like his own, or perhaps the continuation of it. And standing in this other hallway was George.

"George," he called, but his brother didn't do anything but just stand there, panting, as if he too had been running and running. Fred knew suddenly that he had to get to George, had to break this window and join up with him so they could keep going and find whatever it was they were running for. He kicked at the base of it, hoping to just bust through, but the glass was too strong. On the other side of it, George kicked, too. Even both of them at once wasn't breaking it.

The general feeling of tense anxiety that had been permeating the dream started to settle in on Fred, and he began to grow panicked. Why wasn't the glass breaking? Couldn't they see that he had to get to George? Frustrated, Fred tried a Stunning Spell, which definitely should have been strong enough to shatter glass.

"_Stupefy!_" But it bounced from the glass and did nothing, even as George, always of a like mind, had attempted the same thing from the other side. This glass must have been magical, or else that surely would have worked. Something was trying to keep him away from George, and that really was just not okay at _all_. The darkness of the hallway was becoming oppressive, and out of each of the wide-open doors there started to gush cold, caustic air that bore upon it a vile stench. Frantic, Fred started pounding on the glass window and screaming.

"George! _George!_"

But George was doing the exact same thing, and nothing was happening - and that was when Fred realized it. George was doing the _exact_ same thing. Including the screaming, which from the looks of it - Fred could hear nothing through the glass but could read his lips moving - was _his own name_.

It wasn't a window through which Fred could see George. It was a mirror, in which Fred could only see himself. And he was alone.

Fred awoke with a shuddering gasp, his hand tensing and then relaxing in the thin sheet where in his dream, a moment ago, he'd been gripping his wand in a panic. One by one, the details of the real world started to seep back into him. He wasn't cold, not in early July. It wasn't dark in their room, either - though Grimmauld Place didn't let _too_ much light in, it was probably well past nine in the morning and the sun was assuredly out and streaming pitifully through their window. And with George's arm slung over his waist from behind, his knee digging into Fred's thigh and his slack, sleeping mouth pressed wetly into the back of Fred's neck, he was definitely not alone.

The horrible smell was still there, though.

Screwing up his face at the odor, Fred rolled over to lie face up, dislodging George a little in the process, and tried to search around the room for whatever was producing it.

"Oi..." George mumbled faintly, trying to squirm back closer to Fred. Then he seemed to notice the smell too, and grimaced. "_Oi_."

Fred, unfortunately, had spotted it: in a pile on the quilt, right at the foot of their bed.

"Looks like Padfoot decided to leave us a gift, Georgey," he said, pointing.

George rolled over and looked at it. "Oh, bloody _hell_!" he said. "That's low, that is."

"Quite low," said Fred. "Best way to get back?"

"Go lower!" George said, as if it were the plainest thing in the world.

Fred caught a glance of himself in the mirror of the vanity that was against the opposite wall, sitting up against the bed's headboard with George sort of sprawled on the bed still, arm across his ribcage. He smiled, and gave himself a wink.

Nothing but a bad dream.

His reflection pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger and started waving at the air.

-xxx-

Sirius returned to his room just before dinner to change into some clothes that weren't covered in soot - Arthur had decided that they really ought to clean out all the fireplaces, never mind that it was nearly July - to a sick, very recognizable smell.

"_Remus!_" he called down the stairs. "You'd better see this!"

The top sheet on Sirius's wide feather bed had been stained with a very particular substance, in very particular spots. Not wanting to touch it at all, he used his wand to raise it into the air and suspend it there like a banner. When Remus walked in, the first thing he saw was the words _What we lack in potency we make up in style! Cheers, Gemini & Gemini, Esq._, inscribed across the sheet in spots that were wet and just faintly yellower than the rest.

"That's repulsive," said Remus, shielding his mouth and nose from the smell.

"That's _hilarious_!" said Sirius, even though he was fairly disgusted too. "You know, I think I'm starting to quite like those prats. Could've been great Marauders if they'd been around in our day, don't you think?"

"What I think is that we're supposed to be cleaning up messes, not making them," Remus fussed. "I can guess from this what you did to them last night, _Padfoot_."

"And so what if I did?" said Sirius. He was grinning, reading the stained-in message over and over again - at least until Remus waved his wand and scrubbed it away.

But even Remus had to pause then. "There were no enchantments on it," he said, with a mortified frown. "They did all that by...er...hand."

Sirius cackled with laughter.


	3. Chapter 3

**Part the Third, In Which Things Stop Being Quite So Funny**

The jokes died down for a couple of days because big things were going on.

"It's _Friday_!" Ginny sang, a bit shrill for George's half-asleep ears but nevertheless justified.

"What about Friday?" Fred grumbled, his own ears probably more than half-asleep, but George was nudging him awake alongside Ginny now, just as excited.

"Friday, _Friday_," he repeated pointedly, and then Fred realized what was going on and jolted awake.

"Friday?"

"_Friday_!"

Shooing their sister out of their room, George and Fred got dressed and Apparated down to the dining room, where Lupin ended up walking straight into them as they appeared in his path.

"Whoa, whoa, what's the big to-do?" he said, catching himself against the stair railing.

"Bill's coming today!"

"Bill's back!"

"Home from Egypt!"

"Working here in England now!"

George had nearly forgotten he _could_ Apparate - he'd forgotten a lot of things. Most of what he remembered were faint whispers of the odd dream he'd been having, and Bill. _Bill_. Soon he and Fred had filled their plates with food and were looking for a place to sit, anxious to get on with their day, going to be on edge until their oldest brother arrived.

Ginny was sitting at the end of the table closest to the window, no doubt hoping she'd be able to see outside and catch the first glimpse of him. Her hand was distractedly lifting toast to her mouth, and her bites were small and slow. Lupin had sat across the table from her, looking perplexed.

"Forgive me if this is a bit insensitive," he said, "but why exactly are you all so excited?"

"Bill's _brilliant_," Ginny gushed almost immediately.

George sat down next to Ginny, and Fred next to Lupin. "If I had to pick a favorite brother...well, I'd pick him," said Fred, gesturing across to George.

"But we don't really count for each other."

"So after that, it has to be Bill."

"But what makes him so special?" Lupin pressed.

"Dunno," said Fred. "Guess we've got most in common with him?"

"Yeah, the most we have in common with Charlie is red hair and Quidditch," George agreed. "But it's more than that, somehow."

"It's just some kind of..._thing_ that makes him really, really swell," Ginny said, her eyes never leaving the window. "You ever meet someone like that? Where you just think they're brilliant and you don't have any idea why?"

"Moony!" called Sirius from the doorway. "Going to the kitchen, want some more tea?"

"Yes, thank you," said Lupin, smiling back at him for a moment before rejoining the conversation with a cough. "Er, I suppose maybe I have, yes."

"Well that's Bill," said Ginny. "You'll know it when you see him, I swear."

"I reckon if Bill weren't our brother, Ginny'd fancy him," Fred teased.

"He _is_ our brother and you two _still_ fancy him," she shot back, rounding on the two of them.

"Look, there he is!" Fred cried, pointing at the window. "Saw him first!"

"Oh, _damn_!" Ginny hissed, whirling around immediately, but George and Fred were just laughing - there was clearly no one there.

"_Easy_," they said together, smiling across the table at each other.

"Ooh, I hate you two sometimes. Or most times."

Sirius reappeared then with the tea, but he didn't sit down, just sort of hovered behind Lupin and eyed Fred and George in turn. It was making George feel a little uneasy so he said the first thing he could think of to break the silence.

"Done your sheets then, have you?"

Fred sniggered.

"Yes," said Sirius, looking torn between being unamused and quite amused indeed. "And your quilt, there?"

"Had to," said George, "after all that."

"What are you _on_ about?" said Ginny, rolling her eyes.

Fred opened his mouth to explain, and George could see a spectacular lie forming on his lips, but the explanation wasn't necessary as their father bustled into the room with the announcement everyone was waiting for.

"Come on, you lot, your brother's here!"

"_What_?"

"Where?"

"How'd he get past?"

"Flooed in," he said, "by the master bedroom. Not too hard to do once Dumbledore had told him the Secret I suppose. Head on up, then, don't just leave him standing around with that poor hippogriff!"

But George was way ahead of his father - he reached across the table and took his brother's hand, and they Apparated up at once, leaving their irate sister in the dining room calling them cheaters. With a crack, George and then Fred rematerialized on the third floor in the doorway of the master bedroom, where their oldest brother was bowing to Buckbeak, trying to earn forgiveness for his intrusion. When he stood upright again, he noticed them, and flashed a grin.

"Oi, you two!"

"_Oi_!" they both cried, rushing to embrace him. It had been a couple years since they had seen Bill in the flesh, but he was still as amazing as ever. He was quite tall - he was so far the only one of them who had overtaken their father in height, though George supposed that Ron might do so fairly soon as well. His hair, though cut a little bit shorter, still sat in its ponytail at the base of his neck, and the dragon fang still glinted from his ear. He'd also done something that no other Weasley to George's knowledge had ever managed to do, which was _tan_ - just the barest hint of freckles still across his cheekbones, most of them merging together and darkening his skin. In that moment, George was pretty sure he had the coolest brothers ever.

Well, if it weren't for Ron. And Percy. And maybe Charlie. But still.

"Out of my way!" yelped Ginny, finally having made it to the top of the stairs, and she elbowed past the two of them to cling to Bill in an enormous hug of her own. He was smiling more broadly now, and lifted her clean from the floor with a little swing that sent her giggling.

"Am I in time for breakfast?" he asked her.

"Absolutely!" said Ginny.

"Just be careful going down the stairs," Fred added.

"Wouldn't want to upset Sirius's mum."

"Just a portrait, but screams like the real thing!"

"And doesn't take kindly to a family of _blood traitors_ holed up in her precious pureblood house."

Bill rolled his eyes. "How's that working out for Mum, then?"

"If you think Mum's bad, you should see Hermione - Ron's Muggleborn friend," said Fred.

"She's in a right state."

"Been looking through books for a week trying to find a way to undo a Permanent Sticking Charm."

"Says 'permanent' right in it, though, doesn't it?"

"Give your brother some space, you three," called their father from the top of the stairs. "I bet the boy's hungry."

So, reluctantly, George stepped out of Bill's way, and they followed eagerly on his heels back down to finish eating breakfast, with Ginny hovering right next to him and Fred and George just behind. For a moment Fred took his eyes from Bill and caught George's gaze instead, smiling a goofy, brilliant smile that George was sure matched the one on his own face.

_Bill_ was here. And he had the best brothers ever.

Even Ron wasn't so bad.

-xxx-

Bill Weasley was staying at Number 12 until he could find a flat in the city, within a reasonable distance of Diagon Alley. They set him up in Ron's room - quite convenient having so many brothers, Remus imagined - but this still didn't mean that they could slow down on their cleaning process. A house as large as Number 12 had a _lot_ of rooms where vicious pests could be taking up residence. Remus didn't mind the cleaning so much. None of the creatures that had crept in while the house had been in disrepair were particularly vicious, and even the scrub-and-wash actual _cleaning_ part of the cleaning was oddly therapeutic. He'd be so worn at the end of the day that he wouldn't quite worry about staying the night in Sirius's room instead of his own - and secretly, he was glad that his reservations were fading. It was nice, to stay by someone through the night. He could even put up with Sirius's occasional snores.

It was mostly Sirius's complaining that he couldn't stand.

"If no one's sleeping there, why are we even _cleaning_ that room?" he grumbled as he flung himself into a chair at lunchtime.

"The more people Dumbledore recruits for the Order, the more frequent and extensive our meetings are going to be," Remus reminded him. "You need to be a gracious host, and it's hard to do that if we can hear doxies thumping about upstairs and puffskeins scurrying around in the walls."

"Doxies?" said Sirius. "You haven't found _doxies_?"

"There might be some yet, in that drawing room."

Sirius stiffened up immediately, as he had every time someone had mentioned the drawing room. "Not even worth cleaning, that one," he said after a moment, scowling off into indeterminate space. "Doxies can have it."

Remus had opened his mouth to ask, for the tenth or twentieth time, just _what_ was so bad about that drawing room, but a soft bell sounded from the vicinity of the front door - not the loud, clanging doorbell, but the ringing that told the occupants of the house that owls had arrived with the mail.

"Post's here," Sirius said.

"I'll get it, I suppose," said Remus, but he gave Sirius a look to ensure him that this drawing room business was not over.

As soon as Remus was fully out the door he felt it shrinking to nothing behind him. He took a few steps down the sidewalk to where the owls were perched - one right on top of a Muggle mailbox, ironically - and took the dozens of things they were carrying. Three copies of the _Prophet_ - Sirius's, Hermione's, and one for the whole house; a slim packet of correspondence from Dumbledore for Remus himself, no doubt about that horrible werewolf situation with You-Know-Who; some sort of Ministry memo for Arthur; two letters from Harry, addressed to Ron and Hermione in an angry hand; several pieces of utter junk; and a small envelope, stained faintly lavender, that was conspicuous in its very inconspicuousness and that bore only the dainty letters _WW_. Remus tucked his own mail inside his robes and crossed back up to the reforming Number 12 examining this last oddity.

"Have my _Prophet_, Moony?" Sirius asked as he re-entered the house and crossed back to the dining room.

"Oh, yes, here," said Remus, handing it over but keeping his eyes fixed on the strange lavender envelope.

Sirius noticed it. "What's that there?"

"No idea," said Remus. "That's why it's so strange."

Sirius took it from him and studied it as well - and then a slow, excited grin stretched across his face.

"_WW_," said Sirius. "Surely this is for those brats and their bloody joke shop!"

"What?" said Remus.

"The twins, Moony," said Sirius. "They're opening a shop - _Wizard Wheezes_ or somesuch, with Ws. They don't think anyone knows it, but I'd say everyone knows except their parents."

"And me," Remus said shortly, a bit embarrassed.

"Oh. Well, but still," said Sirius. "If people would bother to read the _Prophet_, they'd have seen the adverts here and there. They're taking orders up there, until they can open the shop proper. Right under their mother's nose, sneaky gits." Though he admonished them, the grin still hadn't left Sirius's face. "Very difficult to be sneaky in this house."

Remus was beginning to catch on, and allowed himself a small smile of his own. "It would be quite unfortunate for our young entrepreneurs if this letter ended up squealing on them, wouldn't it," he said.

"_Squealing_," said Sirius. "Oh, Moony, I've always liked the way you think."

"That's because it's actually _thinking_, unlike whatever it is you do," he deadpanned without hesitation. Sirius cuffed him on the back of the head, but then kissed him, soft and thick at the corner of his jawbone right behind his ear. They turned back to the letter, both of them smiling.

Now it was just a matter of which one of them could still cast an undetectable Spill-It Spell.

-xxx-

"I dunno, Fred, maybe we should just stick to the three we've already got and start selling them as-is."

Fred raised his head from where he'd been hunched over the toilet, making eye contact in the bathroom mirror with George where he stood at the door. "No good," he said, wiping his mouth. "It wouldn't be worth marketing as a whole Snackbox to just have three, we might as well just sell them individually."

"Then we just do that."

"Then only the Nosebleed Nougat would - " Fred stopped speaking, to retch into the toilet bowl once more. It had been like this for several minutes now and never had he had a long enough break to do more than speak a sentence or two to George. Fred was certain he wouldn't be able to get down the other half of the pastille for a while yet.

"Sell very well, oh, you're right," said George. "The Fainting Fancies aren't any good unless you've got a cohort - we need to remember to think in terms of individuals more often, you and I - and fevers just aren't very glamorous." He thought for a minute, the silence left by him not speaking filled with Fred's own heaves. "Guess puking isn't either, but it gets the job undeniably done."

Fred fought back the bile as hard as he could and took a deep, cleansing breath through his nose. It was now or never. Immediately he stuck out his hand to George, and George hastily slapped over the purple sweet - a bit slimy, as Fred had already tried to swallow it once. It tasted a bit sour, but in the way some sweets often were on the outside, and the puckering his face did in reaction to the flavor actually helped him a little in getting it down. At long last he felt the hard candy slip down his throat, and Fred coughed and sputtered a bit, but definitely stopped vomiting.

"_Finally_," George breathed.

"Yeah, you're doing the next one," Fred shot back. "Come on, I need some pumpkin juice or something to get this awful taste out of my mouth." He checked himself over in the mirror, casted a quick cleaning charm to the front of his shirt, fixed his hair, and then Apparated down to the kitchen along with George. His mother was there, working on an enormous roast that was to be their dinner, as well as the pretty Metamorphmagus called Tonks who'd been around lately, her hair a subdued violet - she'd clearly volunteered to help with the cooking and been soundly denied, and was now perched on a bit of counter that was far out of Molly Weasley's way. The smell of food so immediately after he'd been puking his guts out upstairs was kind of repulsive - he wasn't still sick, not after the recovery end of the Puking Pastille, but it did gross him out. Thankfully, George covered his revulsion.

"Rather a large amount of food, Mum, even for ten - eleven," he said, with a nod to Tonks. "Who's staying over this time?"

"Mister Shacklebolt is coming, and I think Emmeline Vance and a nephew of hers - d'you know him from Hogwarts?"

Fred thought for a moment, then frowned. "_Connor_ Vance? The Hufflepuff?"

"That's him, yes. Lovely boy, quite charming."

"If by 'charming' you mean a simpering people-pleasing git, then yeah," George groaned. He raised an eyebrow to Fred, and the meaning was quite understood - they may be needing those Skiving Snackboxes themselves sooner rather than later.

"Oh, be nice."

"Then a rousing Order meeting after that, is it?"

She sputtered a bit. "W-w-why, of _course_ not, Freddie - "

"George," said Fred, rolling his eyes and grinning at his brother.

" - no, no, you know the meetings haven't started yet, and - "

"Oh, Molly, are you really going to keep this charade up?" said Tonks suddenly, her hair brightening and going a bit pinker. "No reason for you lot to be holed up in here if we weren't having these meetings twice a week or more. And you two are of age, aren't you?"

"_As if you couldn't tell_, with the way they've been Apparating all about the place as if they own it, don't come crying to me when you splinch yourself something awful and end up with no ears with which to eavesdrop - " She seemed to realize suddenly that she hadn't continued to deny the existence of the Order meetings, and stopped talking, slumping back down over her cauldron with a twinge of defeat in her shoulders.

Somewhere between her last comment and his high-five to George, Fred got some brilliant idea about _ears_, but his thoughts - and everything else in the house, for that matter - were quite suddenly interrupted.

"_Dearest Bill~!_" crooned a sugary-sweet and impossibly loud voice from the room above them. It was a voice Fred faintly recognized, way in the back of his mind, but he couldn't quite place it. Even so, he was sure it should definitely not have been coming from upstairs. He and George popped upstairs with a crack, Tonks following behind them the normal way with a bit of stumbling at the top of the stairs.

"_Eet 'as been only a few days, but already I am meesing you,_" the saccharine French accent continued on. "_Eet ees so 'ard to go for so long not knowing where you weell be, weeth your seekret doeengs zat you weell not tell me of. I seenk about you and only you ev'ry night before I am sleeping, 'oping zat you are safe and coming to no 'arm, and zat you are seenking of me too._"

Fred, George, and Hermione bustled into the dining room all at about the same time, to see that the source of the booming voice was a small, faintly purple slip of parchment, that had once been quite delicately folded but was now held, wide open to sing itself to the world, in their oldest brother's hands. Bill's face was blushing a dark crimson under his tanned skin, from embarrassment or fury or a potent mix of the two. He tried over and over to refold the letter, but it wouldn't close, and the message continued on.

"_I seenk so many soughts of you, dearest. So strong and so 'umble, no need to show off 'ow you do such dangerous sings all of ze time. And oh, but you are 'umble about your looks too! So 'andsome, more zan I could be saying of your brozzers, clearly ze 'andsomest of all._"

Fred, George and Hermione said it at once, throwing baffled looks at one another - Hermione looked quite miffed, but the two of them were grinning. "_Fleur Delacour?_"

It had to be! Fred had finally placed the voice, and there was no mistaking the Beauxbatons champion with her broken English and that horrendous vanity she exuded without even being aware of it. Bill had gotten a simpering, lilac-colored love note from Fleur Delacour.

Lupin and Sirius had come in now, and Tonks, and Ron, and the dining room was getting a bit crowded. Fred clamped his hands over his ears to drown it out - both the loud volume, and the increasingly sappy and mortifying endearments contained in the letter's text. He didn't think it would ever be over, but quite suddenly it was, with a grand "_Your sweet French rose, Fleur~_" and then a silence that left his ears ringing.

The silence didn't last long. Fred, George and Ron burst into endlessly amused guffaws in almost the same moment as the portrait of Walburga Black started shrieking in the hallway, clearly determined to be the only loud disembodied voice in the household. As Sirius and Lupin went to shut her up, taking Ron with them for help, Bill rounded on Fred and George.

"I can't believe you two!"

"Sorry, it's just it's so - "

"Hilarious -

"_Ridiculous_ - "

"_Dearest Beeelll,_" Fred howled, drawing out her accent to a parodical extreme, and their laughter only increased.

"You did this!"

"No, mate, I'm pretty sure Fleur did this - "

"_Charmed my letter to read itself to the whole house_, you wankers! It's just like something you two would do for a lark!"

It finally registered with Fred that Bill was truly serious, and he tried to rein in his laughter. "Now hang on, we haven't done at all."

"Not even touched the post today," said George. "Nothing in it for us."

"This is my - my _personal business_!" he hissed. "There's no way the letter just did this on its own! Fleur and I were trying to keep it a secret until we had it figured out for sure!"

"Bill, of all the people in this house to pull one on, we'd never pick you!" George insisted. "We've been looking forward to you getting here for weeks!"

"Hate to start a disagreement with you so soon!" Fred agreed.

"Just because you're of age doesn't mean you can start just doing whatever you please. Don't you think you should have outgrown these sorts of pranks by now?"

And that - _pranks_, combined with the way Lupin and Sirius had so quickly fled the scene when the letter was finished, the fact that Lupin usually checked the post - was the magic word. It suddenly clicked in Fred's head, and a second later he saw the light flicker on behind George's eyes as well.

"I can't believe you," Bill said again, his hot fury settling into a calm, harsher anger.

The same tone crept dangerously into Fred's voice, as he stared at the dining room door, where Hermione and Tonks were ducking sheepishly out away from the argument, and where Sirius and Lupin had made their exit a moment ago.

"Neither can I."

-xxx-

George sprawled on his back on their bed, frustratedly charming big splots of brightly colored paint onto their ceiling. They hit and splattered in time with Fred's feet frustratedly pacing the floor - red, cerulean, cream, acid green, magenta -

"This has gone too far," Fred growled.

"Said that already, haven't we?"

"Georgey, it's _Bill_. I can't think of many things in the world worse than _Bill_ being mad at us."

"I know, Fred, we - "

"We've got to get them, though!" he said. "Don't you understand?"

"I _do_," said George, flicking yellow and ultramarine onto the ceiling. "But we've been talking over this since dinner and we still haven't come up with anything that's going to hit them as hard as this."

Fred sat down on the edge of the bed, close enough that his body rested against George's ribcage, a bit defeated. "We turn them on each other."

"That'd be like trying to turn me on you, Freddie," said George, resting his hand on Fred's, stopping with the paint. "Not going to happen in a million years."

"Then what? There isn't anyone here that's close enough to them to - "

"Sirius!" admonished a low, hissing voice in the hallway. "Will you please _stop that_?"

Falling silent instantly, George and Fred rose from the bed and crossed the room - Fred to the door, and George to the box in his trunk that had inside of it the pair of Matter-Mist Monocles they had bought on their last trip to Zonko's. As he crept back to the door as well, he passed one to Fred, and they peered straight through the solid wood of the door. Everything seemed like a grainy old black-and-white photo, but they could still see, without ever having to reveal that they were watching.

Apparently, what Lupin was telling Sirius to _stop!_ was a light stabbing at his ribs, and he was squirming and choking back laughter as they passed George and Fred's room on their way up the stairs. Sirius was laughing, too, and clearly not letting up, until finally Lupin whisked his wand back in Sirius's direction. Above his head there appeared a thick, rolled-up newspaper, and it smacked Sirius soundly about his head of its own volition. Seemingly satisfied with the whine Sirius gave, Lupin turned over his shoulder to smile at his friend.

Sirius's reaction to this was to lean forward and give his "friend" a soft, almost _sweet_ kiss on his lips.

Lupin started, hastily searching around to make sure no one had seen - for a moment he appeared to look straight at George, though he knew the door was blocking them from sight. But when he found no one who might catch them at it, Lupin kissed _back_, completely serious about it. Then, after a moment, they continued down the hallway and up the stairs, laughing at each other softly, and George and Fred watched after them as long as they could with their Monocles to their eyes. Neither of them gasped loudly to give their position away, or dropped the devices clatteringly to the floor in shock.

Really, they'd just had their suspicions confirmed.

"George," Fred murmured after a bit, when the couple in the hallway was finally gone. "I think we're going to have to start fighting dirty."

"Fred, old chap," said George, "we started fighting dirty the minute we pissed in their bed."


	4. Chapter 4

**Part the Fourth, In Which No One Wins But No One Really Loses**

A week passed.

It was a week for which Bill remained angry at his twin brothers, still convinced that the loud, impassioned reading of his love letter had been their doing. It was a week in which the final third-floor bedroom got scoured clean, and they all began to start in on the bathrooms, never touching the fourth floor, never touching the drawing room. It was a week in which three more Order of the Phoenix meetings took place, one of which Dumbledore attended, and another of which the younger Weasleys and Hermione overheard a good sixty percent of - because it was a week in which Fred and George decided to switch gears from joke sweets to the brilliant idea he'd had in the kitchen, and they had invented, created, and made a fair bit of progress toward perfecting their Extendable Ears. The older Order members talked in hushed tones - or in the case of the two members of the Black family, not-so-hushed tones - about how the Ministry was bogus ("Tell us something we don't know, why don't they," said Ron), how You-Know-Who was planning...something, and how some of them were being sent out in shifts to guard...something. It was all very vague, and the vagueness wasn't helped by their still slightly unreliable hearing aid, but it was miles better than being kept in the dark.

With their Ears on the Order as a whole, though, Fred and George were instead keeping their eyes on Lupin and Sirius.

This was the week when they were going to catch them at it.

But what Fred was quickly learning was that if Marauders didn't want you to catch them doing something, it was incredibly difficult. During the day, through cleaning and mealtimes and checking the post and relaxing in the downstairs den with a book or the wireless, Sirius and Lupin did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary - as long as other people were watching. Sure, now that he was watching for it, Fred could see little bits of things between them - a more meaningful cast to a look they shared, their slightly excessive casual physicality with one another - but if he thought about it, these were things they had always done, and they had never meant anything before. If Fred thought about it, these were things even less close and emotional than things he did with George, and no one had ever once expected _them_ of -

He shook his head, clearing it of the revulsion that had welled up and brought with it faint, inexplicable traces of something else strange.

"Something amiss?" George hissed through the darkness of their room. Fred smiled a bit to himself. Should have figured that if he was having trouble sleeping, his twin would be too.

"Just stuck on this weird dream I had a couple weeks ago," Fred said vaguely. "Trying not to think about it, but I still can't sleep."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," said George. "Had a funny dream not too long ago myself. Stuff like that shakes you sometimes."

"Yeah," said Fred, and he'd been thinking about saying something more, but a scraping sound from somewhere above them distracted him from his train of thought.

He sat up a bit and turned to look at George, who'd done the same, and then they both turned their heads up to look at the ceiling. The sound came again, as if some piece of furniture in the room above theirs was screeching reluctantly across the floor.

"Speaking of _shaking_!" George hissed with a wink, but Fred paled. Right on top of their heads, those two couldn't be - no, there really was no way. There was no sort of rhythm to it, and each grinding noise was too long and drawn-out to be the product of the slight movements anything like _that_ would be producing.

And once that nasty thought had cleared from his mind, Fred Weasley had a scathingly brilliant idea.

-xxx-

Sirius's bed had obviously not been moved from its spot in quite some time. It took both men tugging and shoving on it from all sorts of angles for a good five minutes to realize that it probably wasn't going to do much without magic, and even the wave that Remus gave with his wand set it lurching across the floor, digging shallow grooves into the old wood. Finally they managed to get it turned around, to face not the wardrobe but the door to the bathroom he had shared with Regulus, and the pale silvery light from the window streamed harmlessly across the floorboards instead of onto the foot of the bed.

Sirius had sat back down on the bed almost immediately once they'd gotten it into place, and as he beckoned Remus to sit beside him, Remus followed, still wearing a slight frown.

"You're sure?" he said after a moment, staring off at the floor.

"Absolutely sure," said Sirius, taking Remus's hand in his against his thigh. "Place needs a bit of redecorating every once in a while as it is. Never tried it like this before, looks nice."

"It looks horrible," said Remus, "and it will until we move everything else. You can't even open your bathroom door like this, with that chest in the way - "

"All of that can wait until morning, Moony," Sirius assured him. "Stop worrying about everything, and come back to bed."

"It just feels so childish."

"Wanting to turn the bed so that you don't have to see the moon out the window is not _childish_," said Sirius, rolling his eyes at how grave an assault on his manliness Remus appeared to think this was. "I know you have a hard enough time sleeping as it is, when you're _not_ staring at a big honking reminder like that, and _I_, for one, want the only thing that keeps you awake at night to be _me_. Nobody in this house except that deranged old picture of my deranged old mother is bothered by the fact that you're a werewolf, now _go to sleep_."

Remus's smile crept slowly back onto his face, and Sirius was so glad to see it that his own grew broader, even though he could tell that very, very soon, he was going to have to abandon the smile in favor of doing other things with his mouth. Sure enough, the kiss came gentle and Moony-soft, and Sirius as usual had to take it upon himself to deepen it - not that Remus was protesting. Soon he had managed to coax Remus into lying back on the bed, and Sirius hovered over him, one arm propping him up and the other hand cupping around Remus's jaw in a way that was neither delicate nor overly firm, just the same way it had always done, in a gesture that he didn't even need to think about any more.

A gesture that, unbeknownst to either of them at the time, would be forever immortalized on film.

-xxx-

Even with his lunar irritation mostly taken care of, the streak of Remus that made him a habitually early riser hadn't at all vanished, and he woke to a silent house (Sirius's faint snores notwithstanding). Careful not to wake his bedmate, Remus slipped out of bed and began heading downstairs, tiptoeing past both Hermione and Ginny's room and the portrait of Walburga - the three people his presence was most likely to wake. Tea for himself and coffee for Sirius were definitely in order, he thought, as he descended to the kitchen. Remus hadn't liked giving Sirius too much coffee ever since Azkaban - he needed nothing that would string him even more tightly - but especially with how lovely he had been the night before with the whole bed placement debacle, Sirius deserved to have something nice waiting for him when he woke up.

Instead, what he was going to have waiting for him were two nastily grinning Weasley twins.

"Oh, good morning, you two," Remus said as mildly as he could manage, a bit frightened of what the shared look on their identical faces might foretell. "I didn't think anyone else was awake."

"Yeah, well," said one.

"We are," said the other.

"Excellent, then," he said. "Ah, afraid I didn't make quite enough tea for three..." He crossed to the table, apologetic, but their scathing eyes were no longer on him. They were looking at a spot on the dining room wall next to the door that Remus had just come through, and when Remus turned to look as well, the already tenuous grip he had on the two mugs after the twins' strange behavior slackened entirely, and his tea and Sirius's coffee thunked dully to the ornately carpeted floor.

Attached to the wall in a way that looked awfully permanent, inside a frame that was too elaborate and gaudy to be anything but Fred and George's own conjuration, was a full-color photograph of Sirius and himself, as they had been just after resolving the issue of the _bed that they were sharing_. Sirius's long hair spilled over his bare shoulders and down toward Remus's face where he leaned overtop; he flashed a quick wink out of the portrait, and both Remuses' faces flushed, and then the Remus and Sirius in the portrait engaged in a very familiar-looking kiss.

"But...how - "

"Extendable Ears," said one twin.

"Quite fond of them."

"Heard you two shoving the furniture about - "

"Then we decided we'd catch you in the act -

"And after that _touching_ conversation about the big scary moonlight - "

"You two were too _distracted_ to notice a measly levitating camera."

Remus couldn't turn away from it. As much as the Remus in the photograph seemed embarrassed that other people could see him, the real and actual Remus was sinking into utter mortification. Other people were going to _see this_. Other people had _already_ seen this. What were they going to do?

Oh, god, what was _Sirius_ going to do?

After a few more stunned moments of Remus remaining frozen staring the wall and the twins' eyes burning into his back, he found out.

"_There_ you are, thought I smelled _coffee_, you know my nose has been sharper ever since - _oh, bloody hell._" Sirius, quite the opposite of Remus, suddenly couldn't figure out _where_ to look - he was flicking back and forth between the photograph, and the twins, and Remus's own horrified face and slack hands.

"_What are you two thinking_?" Sirius roared at them. "This is mine and Moony's _personal business_!"

"We're thinking the same thing you must have been thinking when you chose to air our brother's _personal business_ to the entire household!" Fred spat - must have been Fred, the two shouts were far too alike.

"You're still on about that after a whole _week_?"

"Bill's still cross with us, isn't he?" said George.

"We - we never meant to bring your brother into this," Remus said distantly. "Supposed to be you two."

"_What_?"

"Yeah, that's right!" said Sirius. "We saw _WW_ and thought it was something for your bloody shop, not _William Weasley_!"

"Oh, so you were just going to have our orders read themselves out where Mum could hear instead?" snapped Fred. "Ruin the _other_ thing that makes us happiest in this world, then?"

"You know damn well that you're resourceful enough that that wouldn't have _ruined_ anything!" said Sirius. "You'll keep on going!"

"Well then _you_ can keep on going with your relationship out of the bloody closet!"

Their row was waking other people now - though thankfully not the portrait of Sirius's mother yet - and Remus could hear another of the male Weasleys thumping down the stairs (too tall to be anyone else) as well as Tonks (who'd been too tired and tipsy from after their meeting last night to Apparate home and whose heavy-footedness was unmistakable). He tried to imagine their reactions to the photo. Tonks would go mental, surely - probably not be too bothered by the nature of the relationship itself, but the surprise would no doubt spark a reaction just as loud and violent as Sirius's. Ron would be appalled and uncomfortable like any straight teenage boy...what of Arthur, or Bill? Quiet shame? Open-armed acceptance? Confused denial to even broach the subject?

"Sirius," said Remus, faint, but he didn't hear.

"Get that thing off the bloody wall," he growled at the twins.

"No can do," said one.

"Took a page from your mother's book, we did," said the other.

"You did _not_," said Sirius.

"It's Stuck there, Permanently."

"But not quite forever."

"You won't be able to get it down right now if you try."

"It's staying there until our brother stops being angry with us for something we _didn't even do_."

"I'm not angry," said a voice, and Remus finally, finally tore his eyes away from Sirius's wink and his own faint blush to see Bill Weasley standing by the table, looking at his twin brothers with a soft sort of adult frustration at their immaturity. "Not about _that_, any more. Now get that thing down and stop bothering Mr. Lupin."

The shame in Bill's brown eyes compelled Fred and George to rise from their seats and tug the photo down from the wall. The frame promptly vanished, and the picture shrank to the size of a regular Polaroid, which Sirius snatched from them and tucked away in the pockets of his pajama pants.

"Thanks," said Remus, amazed his voice would come at all.

"I'm just doing for you what you _ought_ to have done for me, which is showing some damn respect for private affairs," Bill said harshly. He turned to speak to all of them. "Look, I know you four have been having a bit of an _exchange_ here, but I'm putting an end to it. It's gone too far. This war is over."

Remus, Sirius, Fred and George hung their heads, all for different reasons, but all clearly in defeat.

And Tonks, though for some reason she had gotten a bit teary-eyed, had watched the whole thing happen without saying a single word.

-xxx-

No one that had been there said anything about it. They went through breakfast, cleaning, lunch, more cleaning, a couple rounds of Exploding Snap, and dinner without saying anything. Once Tonks had come perilously close, but even she had managed to play it off into a different context. She'd been awfully quiet for her today anyway, and it was almost as if she compensated for it by becoming twice as clumsy.

George, for one, was almost glad it was all over. They still had those Puking Pastilles to work out - put on hold in favor of Extendable Ears, albeit a worthwhile hiatus - and Wheezes work was hard enough to do without their mum catching on, never mind watching their backs constantly for sticky situations courtesy of Messrs. Moony and Padfoot. And if it meant Bill wasn't angry at them any more, George was willing to go along with just about anything.

But the truth of it was, he actually felt bad. It had mostly been Fred's idea, the photograph, but he'd gone along with it just like always, egging him on, helping him every step of the way, till it became one idea in one mind. And Fred had most certainly done the same with George countless times in the past. But they were grown, of-age wizards now, and even if they were going to make a career out of laughing at other people, they were never going to be taken seriously if they didn't have at least a _little_ scrap of maturity.

Jokes needed to be _funny_.

George and Fred stayed downstairs after dinner long enough to help their mother and their sister wash the dishes, the regular way. They were both a bit subdued now that the prank-off was over. Once that was done, though, they Apparated crisply up into their bedroom, ready to settle in for the night on some honest work. (George had made especially certain to keep from eating anything too vile at dinner, as it was his turn to test out the Pastilles, if they got around to it.)

"Oh, blimey, Georgey..." Fred murmured, his voice a rich mix of confusion and complaint.

On the wall of their bedroom, something awfully similar to the morning's photograph had resurfaced - but this time, inside the grandiose frame stuck soundly to the wall, the picture showed not Sirius and Lupin but Fred and George, their likenesses clearly charmed in overtop of the old image in such a way that they were there carrying out its actions. George flushing. Fred winking. Both of them - for some horrible, horrible reason - _kissing_.

"Padfoot's got to have the last bloody laugh, doesn't he," said Fred, but his voice had gone funny, and though George couldn't describe _how_ it had, he knew his own voice was going to do just the same when he began to speak.

"That dream you had," he said, funnily, and not at all the words he'd been planning to say. "You're in a great hallway - "

Fred gasped. "With lots of doors - "

"And there's this window - "

"Only it isn't a window, it's a bloody mirror, and - "

"_You're not my bloody reflection,_" they said at once, neither one of them looking at the photo now, just at each other, breath coming strangely heavily, eyes searching, and George didn't even know what for. After a few tense, surreal moments, it finally returned to him: a phrase they'd spoken to one another, right when this daft war had began, one of the truest things their trickster lips had ever let out.

"Only thing we've truly got going for us," he breathed to Fred, "is _this_."

Then in ways he didn't understand, just as he didn't quite understand the dream they'd both had, or the way their voices had gone all funny, George's hand was tucked tight into the hair by Fred's ear, and they were kissing furiously, with more drive and desperation than the picture on the wall could ever display. They fell back onto the bed they were sharing, George on top, backwards from the charmed photo, and didn't bloody _stop_, not when they were panting and gasping for air, not when Fred bit George's lip hard enough to draw blood, not when both of them started getting hard and sliding against each other in attempts to relieve it. It didn't seem like romance, or lust, or anything so taboo as that - George almost just felt it as an extension of their relationship as brothers, the deep and loving _twinness_ of them, the FredandGeorginess, the only thing they truly had going for them. They loved each other, they understood each other, they knew how to make each other laugh, and with any luck that knowledge could extend outward to make other people laugh too, and with any luck that laughter could give them a career, and that career could give them a livelihood that would let them be FredandGeorge forever.

It was over almost before it began, and George was quite embarrassed to need to charm his pants and trousers clean until he noticed that Fred was doing the same. Their faces were flushed a good Weasley red, and they grinned ridiculously at each other, and then got back up from the bed, and ten minutes later George was spitting up weakly into their toilet, and Fred was huffing in frustration that they appeared to have done too little instead of too much this time, and though it was clear that neither one of them was going to speak of it, George had the distinct feeling it was going to happen again.

The next morning the photo was gone off the wall, and when George and Fred made their way down for breakfast, Lupin and Sirius were sitting side by side, smiling, but no one said anything out of the ordinary. The war was over - and perhaps everyone had won after all.

Two days after that, Lupin ducked into his own room in search of a book he thought he might have left there, and when he re-emerged his robes were a brilliant violet, courtesy of _Gemini & Gemini, Esq._ He'd left them all day, bringing a smile to everyone's faces, even Bill's.

"It's a lovely color on you," Fred had choked out before bursting out laughing himself.

"I dunno, Freddie, maybe we should have done him in the pink, instead."

"If you ever want to get your dear younger brother," Lupin said lightly, "might I suggest neon yellow? It'd bring out the gold in his eyes, you see."

George howled, and relished in it, because jokes were supposed to be funny.

Then four days after that, Harry Potter had gotten himself attacked by dementors. And _that_ was a certain sign that everything was back to normal.

-xxx-

fin.


End file.
